Iain Banks

Born 16 February 1954 · Died 9 June 2013

Iain Banks (16 February 1954 – 9 June 2013) was a Scottish author. He wrote mainstream fiction under the name Iain Banks, and science fiction as Iain M. Banks, including the initial of his adopted middle name Menzies.

Quotes

“Beauty is something that disappears when you try to define it.”
The State of the Art, p. 128
“Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present.”
The State of the Art, p. 75
“Empathize with stupidity and you’re halfway to thinking like an idiot.”
Consider Phlebas, Chapter 2
“That was how divorced from the human scale modern warfare had become. You could smash and destroy from unthinkable distances, obliterate planets from beyond their own system and provoke stars into novae from light-years off...and still have no good idea why you were really fighting.”
Consider Phlebas, Chapter 2
“Truth, I have learned, differs for everybody. Just as no two people ever see a rainbow in exactly the same place—and yet both most certainly see it, while the person seemingly standing right underneath it does not see it at all—so truth is a question of where one stands, and the direction one is looking in at the time.”
Inversions, Chapter 2